The Huck List: 2025

A quarter of the way into a new century, it’s easy to feel like the world, and the forces that prop it up, are on increasingly brittle ground. The climate crisis is intensifying, with natural disasters of record-breaking severity hitting across the world. Shortening attention spans and generative AI are taking us further from reality, while the far right continues to make tracks across nations.

But it’s why we need remarkable people, doing remarkable things, more than ever. Musicians rewriting genres, artists evoking new possibilities, sporting figures breaking through adversity, photographers capturing details that the naked eyes miss. Since Huck was founded in 2006, as a counterpoint to the commercial and mainstream, we’ve focused on those who inspire, create, and do things in their own way against the odds.

With the tides getting stronger, it’s never been more important to paddle against the flow. Introducing The 2025 Huck List: a rolling collection of our favourite changemakers and creative pioneers who define our year.

Since striking out on her own as a teenager and immersing herself in Durban’s underground music scene, Moonchild Sanelly has exploded to become a truly global pop star.

Her music, usually sung in both English and Xhosa, is unapologetically sex positive and liberation-focused, drawing upon anything from R&B, trap, hip-hop, kwaito, gqom and amapiano in a distinctive cocktail she calls ​“future ghetto funk”. But she also cares about the world around her, only hiring women and LGBTQ+ folk to assemble a team that she calls ​“The Avengers”.

Ahead of her new album Full Moon, we caught up with her in our monthly newsletter interview series. Read it here.

Having once been held up as a symbol of Russian youth activism and rebellion, experimental duo and self-described ​“audiovisual terrorists” IC3PEAK are now living in exile, having left Russia following their home country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago.

Their latest album, Coming Home, is their most intimate, introverted record yet, and explores their new reality amid displacement. Huck caught up with Nick and Nastya to hear about the record, their journey so far, and searching for home in foreign lands. Read the full profile here.

Having been a solo artist throughout her career, Sharon Van Etten chose to open her process to collaboration and release a band album, as a means of feeling more connected through art and music in a hyper-connected age when it has never felt easier to feel alone.

Read the full interview here.

A trailblazer who has been a key driver of the global explosion of Spanish language music, reggaeton superstar Bad Bunny has turned his sights on spotlighting the Puerto Rican cause and fight for independence.

We spoke to him as he topped the Billboard 200 earlier this year. Read the full profile here.

With her blend of moody psychedelia, the nonchalant grit of her vocals and urgent political messaging, Greentea Peng has carved out her own space in a crowded sonic field. Her latest album, ​’TELL DEM IT’S SUNNY’, sees her take a turn towards the introspective, focusing instead on the ​“self political”. It’s her darkest album yet, coming at a grey hour across the world.

We caught up with her in our monthly interview newsletter to hear more about it, read the full interview here.

Last year, Sakir Khader became the first Palestinian photographer to join the historic Magnum Photos agency. His work captures the heartbreaking reality of life for Palestinian people, while spotlighting moments of resilience and life.

We caught up with him ahead of his new exhibition ​‘Yawm al-Firak’ at Foam Amsterdam, which foregrounds the stories of seven young men killed in the West Bank, and the mothers grieving their loss – men and women Khader befriended in Jenin and Nablus on visits between 2021 and 2024. Read the feature here.

Photo by Eva Roefs.

A hero of GB boxing, Frazer Clarke took home a bronze medal at the 2020 Olympic Games.

It tied a bow on a remarkable comeback, following a near death experience after being stabbed in the neck and leg while celebrating the birth of his daughter in 2016.

Now, he’s a fixture on the world heavyweight circuit. Ahead of his fight with Ebenezer Tetteh, he caught up with Robert Kazandjian in our masculinity and fatherhood interview column Hard Feelings to reflect on what he learnt from the experience, hard graft, and the fear and triumph of his first fight. Read the full feature here.

A longtime hero of London’s underground music and culture scene, James Massiah’s new album Bounty Law sees him release his most confident album yet.

With his signature rap-poetry set on top of hazy, reverb heavy, sunrise-hour productions, it’s a cinematic, thought-provoking listen, built for slowing down in the instant-communication world of today.

For our monthly culture newsletter, we spoke to the rapper, poet, DJ, and Adult Entertainment founder about the shifting landscape of life in London, the social contract, and the boom in alt-poetry events across the capital. Read the full interview here.

Since picking up a surfboard at 11, Maryam El Gardoum overcame misogyny and a lack of equiment to become a five-time Moroccan surf champion. In doing so, she’s broken expectations for women and the indigenous Amazigh people.

Now, she is running her own surf school to empower and spread her knowledge to the next generation of women and Amazigh surfers. Read the full profile here.

Having released her last 18-track odyssey in May 2024, prolific songstress Yaya Bey is back with yet another expansive album, do it afraid.

Featuring everything from stripped-back R&B, deep house, dis­co, rap to even sun­ny soca, it’s a defiant record, which breaks narratives that have been slapped on her music by ​‘European voyeurism’ in the past. Now she’s unafraid to speak up, and wants the music industry to be better, too.

We spoke to her in our monthly interview newsletter, read the full interview here.

Photo by Nate Jarvis

As a former freerunning and parkour world champion, and the first woman to jump Paris’s infamous Manpower Gap, Lilou Ruel has been pushing the boundaries of possibility for women in her sport ever since she first burst onto the scene.

Now, having enrolled in stunt school, she’s got her sights set on the big screen, and has already body doubled for the likes of Charli xcx. Read the full profile here.

Photo by Liam Fabre

The Huck List 012: Misan Harriman

Since taking his camera along to a Black Lives Matter protest in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Misan Harriman has become one of the Instagram generation’s most prominent photographers and activist voices. Whether it’s his intimate protest portraiture or becoming the first Black photographer to shoot the cover of Vogue, Harriman’s photographs explores the humanity within.

Now, a new film explores his work and driving motivations, while he is working on producing the Brian Eno led ​‘Together for Gaza’ concert at Wembley Arena on September 17. We spoke to him in the wake of the première of Shoot the People. Read the full interview here.

The Huck List 013: Graham Sayle

High Vis’s Graham Sayle has battled demons that would flatten most – and barely broken a sweat. He is now a voice for suicide awareness and provides spaces and outlets for others to confront grief and loss, through his music and at his shows.

In Huck 82: The Music Issue, Tracy Kawalik goes heart-to-heart with the UK hardcore band’s frontman. Read the full interview here, and purchase your copy here.